Photo: NYSNA
New York, NY—Sunday afternoon, NYSNA nurses at Mount Sinai Morningside and West reached a tentative agreement on a new contract.
Highlights of the agreement include:
(1) Improves staffing standards and enforcement.
(2) Protects quality healthcare and other benefits, including lowering the member costs for healthcare coverage.
(3) Increases salaries over 3 years of the contract 7%, 6 %, 5%.
(4) The tentative agreement now goes to the members to vote on ratification.
So far, seven of the 12 NYC hospitals in negotiations have reached tentative agreements or new contracts, including BronxCare Health System, Flushing Hospital Medical Center, Maimonides Medical Center, Mount Sinai Morningside and West, NewYork-Presbyterian, Richmond University Medical Center, and The Brooklyn Hospital Center.
NYSNA NYC nurses have not reached agreements at two other hospitals in advance of the Jan. 9 strike start date. Those hospitals are Mount Sinai Hospital, representing approximately 3,625 nurses and Montefiore Bronx, representing approximately 3,500 nurses. Both are back at the bargaining table today.
At NYSNA’s daily press briefing, NYSNA President Nancy Hagans, RN, BSN, CCRN, said: “Since NYSNA NYC nurses started negotiating our contracts four months ago, we have said our number one issue is the crisis of chronic understaffing that harms patient care. Safe staffing is about having enough nurses to deliver safe, quality care to every patient. It is the issue that our employers have ignored, made excuses about, and fought against us on.”
Hagans continued: “The time is now to settle fair contracts that help nurses deliver the care that all New Yorkers deserve. We are fighting to improve patient care and will do whatever it takes to win.”
The New York State Nurses Association also said this regarding Governor Lathy Hochul:
“We welcome the Governor’s support in fighting for fair contracts that protect our patients, and we will not give up on our fight to ensure that our patients have enough nurses at the bedside. We call on Gov. Hochul to join us in putting patients over profits and to enforce existing nurse staffing laws. Gov. Hochul should listen to frontline COVID nurse heroes and respect our federally-protected labor and collective bargaining rights. Nurses don’t want to strike. Bosses have pushed us to strike by refusing to seriously consider our proposals to address the desperate crisis of unsafe staffing that harms our patients.”
About New York State Nurses Association
The New York State Nurses Association represents more than 42,000 members in New York State. We are New York’s largest union and professional association for registered nurses. NYSNA is an affiliate of National Nurses United, AFL-CIO, the country’s largest and fastest-growing union and professional association of registered nurses, with more than 225,000 members nationwide.
For more information, visit www.nysna.org.
